Internet opinions needed!!

[Pita]

We have Charter :rolleyes2 , which includes the cable for the TVs, our High-speed Internet, and our phone. Charter sucks!! We lose Internet at least once a day and over the last three days we have lost it for hours at a time. We are investigating the idea of DSL through BellSouth.

Who here has DSL and what do you think about it? We have heard our download time will slower, but we are willing to put up with that if it means having more reliable service.

Help???? :shrug:

[gekkogecko]

Personally, I despise DSL: much perfer cable modem. Oddly enough, I find it far more reliable than DSL.

Obviously, YMMV, since it already is.

[IowaMan]

I just got a DSL connection about 3 weeks ago, I think it was and I love it. Then again I was upgrading from a dial-up connection so the difference was going to be drastic. I've had absolutely no problems though since I got the DSL.

[maddy]

I also found my DSL connection to be less reliable than my cable connection - so unfortunately I'm probably no help either. Is it maybe a bad modem?

[1nutworld]

I've never had DSL, but when I upgraded to cable from the phone line, it was a huge improvment.

What has charter said in regards to your connetion loss problems? Have they offered to give a credit of some sort? From what I understand cable is more stable than DSL service, so it surprises me you're having problems.

Not much help here...........sorry.

[Jude30]

About a year ago my wife and I decided to drop our home phone service get new cell phones and switch to cable for internet.

WORST DECISION EVER!!!!!!!

We had down load speeds as low as 33Kbps. Yes folks that is slower than dial up. The only time I was ever able to get speeds approaching what I would consider high speed internet (1200Kbps) was after 10pm usually later than that. I made customer service complaint calls daily until they finally just canceled my service with no penalty to my contract. Switched back to DSL and haven't had a download speed under 1300Kbps since.

SBC guarantees minimum download speeds of at least 1200Kbps for their cheapest service. Cable wouldn't guarantee shit, and they would only allow me one computer on their network. SBC supplied me with a ten port wireless hub when I resigned with them. They feel the same as I do, once line gets to my house it's my business what I do with it and how much I split it.

Cable put a maximum download of 1GB of data per month with an extra charge if I went over it. SBC doesn't put any sort of limit on how much I can download.

Cable cost me $50 a month, I pay $15 a month for DSL.

You couldn't pay me to go back to cable.

Now DSL wasn't all wine and roses either for a while. We live in an old house with old phone lines. It used to be that every time it rained we'd lose connection. What was really messed up is that when we lost connection if we made a phone call it would reconnect the DSL to the internet so it was hard to prove to tech support we were being disconnected. I finally got if fixed by threatening to switch to cable (this was before I made the actual switch to cable), and report them to the BBB. They came out and replaced the line from my house to the box and I haven't been disconnected for any extended period since then. I do kicked a couple of times per week but it's nothing like it used to be and it's a small price to pay to actually get the speed which I'm paying for.

SBC offers other packages for more money.

Actually this thread reminds me that my contract with them is nearly up.

The site I use for speed tests. (http://content.imagesocket.com/images/TeachMyAss_Rachel.wmv_previewc62.jpg)

[PantyFanatic]

I WILL be 'testing' my connection a lot, J30. ;)

Thanks :D

[Mercury_Maniac]

honestly?

i used to have Charter Cable....and it was the best internet service we ever had, dialup was a joke disconnected constantly and was slow as hell obviously

now have Satillte or however the hell you spell it, its DSL speed and wow it costs more then cable and is 3 times slower.

Cable had some problems now and then, but i put up with because it was so fast.
its depressing how slow dsl is for the price.

[Jude30]

Satelite is NOT DSL speed it's much slower.

[WildIrish]

I've had DSL at work for six years now. It's cheaper than cable, and I've heard it's slower but it usually moves fast enough for me. Then again, I don't usually move humongous files and my mind doesn't work very fast. :p

DSL has been pretty reliable for me. I've had to reboot the router a couple of times, but all in all...over six years, the interuptions have been minimal.

[Eastern]

Hmm we are in PA and we love the Cable internet.
so easy when you want to get online and you are there..

we don't have their phone service but just their internet at this time.

[Coaster]

I'm no expert here... so very limited experience!

I do have DSL in the studio, which is in the center of the city and my speeds are 100(mps?) I move huge photo files and that is plenty fast. I do catch TV Show reruns on my puter with no flicker or anything... it's nice and smooth.

I was told cable slows way down during after school hours. Sorry I couldn't be more help!

[Pita]

Thanks everyone. Sounds sort of hit or miss to me. We are going to keep asking questions every where we can and make a decision by next month.

[Aqua]

I have Cable at home, DSL at work. They both work good, although Cable is a little faster and will handle streaming content better. I would say I probably have had more problems with lost connections at home, but that is not to say it has been frequent. Uptime has been very strong at both locations.

Since your current solution is clearly not much of a solution at all I would give DSL a shot. See if you can get a month to month deal rather than a 6 or 12 month contract. Then if they suck worse than Charter (which sounds hard to do at the moment) you can drop them.

Good luck!

[jseal]

TinglingTess,

It turns out that I have been have been using Verizon DSL for a little more that 6 years now for my home network. I have had two outages.

As I suggested to LixyChick in her new computer thread, I do think you should check with Bell South before you buy the service, because the farther you are from their point of service, the lower your speed will be. They can tell you what speed you can expect if you tell them what your phone number is.

You will also have to put filters on your telephones when the phone company adds the DSL service to your phone line, but I'm sure they'll supply you with several filters (Verizon did).

[Belial]

The performance of cable is highly dependant on what those who live near you (in tech. terms, the people on the same headend as you) do. This is because, as with the TV you get on that cable, it's a broadcast medium and your cable modem filters out what isn't yours. DSL does not have this property and can be considered more stable. Some phone wiring is old and crappy though, and DSL will either flat-out not work, or work poorly. I don't know what the situation is in your area but typically the telco will only guarantee your phone line's quality to a level well short of what you need for DSL. Check with your neighbours, if they have DSL, if they had any problems getting it, especially if their houses are a similar age to yours.

As for speed, cable has been much faster than DSL in the past, but new developments such as ADSL2+ are closing that gap, offering a theoretical maximum of 24Mbps.

I would talk to people in your area, and check out what speeds and what plans are available in your area. All other things being equivalent (or close enough considering what you intend to do on the Internet), I would take DSL over cable.

[dick]

Hey Tess Hon;
We have cable and had them come out and replace their modem once over a year ago since it was still under warranty. The cable guy told me if we have probs after the warranty runs out to consider buying a modem since the ones the cable company provide are not very good. He suggested the Morotola Surfboard Modem SB-5120, and he said you can usually get them at WalMart for $59. We have not had any further problems, so I'm still using the cable company modem.
Does your TV go out when the internet goes out? If not it may very well be a modem problem. Good luck you sexy thing....
Joe

[dicksbro]

We just replaced the modem on our cable connection, too. We'd had the old modem about five years and they said we were extremely lucky to get by for that long. Usually most have been replaced within a couple of years. Amazing. You wouldn't think there'd be anything to wear out.

Oh well, the new modem seems to have gotten rid of the problems we were having with service dropping off several times a day.

[Coastie]

I move alot all over the country and have used various providers for both Cable and DSL.

I have found that in general Cable gives you a higher speed, but can be more quirky and less reliable. With cable usually the bandwidth is shared for any area even though your suppose to have X amount of bandwidth for you.

The DSL bandwidth is generally less than Cable, but how it is setup you should have a fixed amount and it shouldn't go below that regardless of how many people are using it.
You have a fixed amount going from you to the provider, with the cable yours ties in with a number of other peoples on the way to the provider.

As far as reliablity it's probally more so the provider in your area than the type of service you have.

I have had cable internet that would never be down, and then in Southern florida it was really crap we were plagued with problems.
Now in Virginia it's not too bad but we will get intermittent problems

DSL I have never had problems other than them occasionally running some sort of maintenance that results in some downtime, which you will probally have occasionally no matter what you use.